Here is a fantastic video of a shuttle launch, from cameras mounted all over the shuttle. See the launch from dozens of up-close angles. See the boosters drop off, and get first person view of them hitting the water, then back to the shuttle to watch the main tank drop off, and then watch the shuttle hit orbit.

Fast forward to about 4:30, that’s where the credits and previews stop and the actual launch starts.

BONUS: Just for reading, I’ll throw in this video of a spacewalk at the International Space Station taken from someone’s backyard with a 10 inch telescope.

Here’s a video from USC Canada about our food supply. We just saw a great presentation from them on their work with seed banks, trying to get small farmers in Tibet to be self-sufficient without having to buy seed and fertilizer and pesticide from Monsanto and the other corporations.

Oh, and speaking of Monsanto…

The “data strongly suggests” that after just 90 days of eating GM corn, rats experienced kidney toxicity and showed effects to their hearts, adrenal glands, spleen and blood cells.

Yum! Roundup-ready and spleenilicious!

New Year’s Maintenance time!

I’m in the middle of backups and all sorts of year-end (a bit late) stuff.

Gina Trapani over at Smarterware has some good advice about Gmail maintenance.

Make sure your account recovery options are set properly. If the email you give is inactive or broken, you’ll never be able to reset a password. If your security question is wrong, or you’ve forgotten the answer, you’re stuck if you ever want help with GMail.

Go check it now!!

A friend of ours gave us a snowflake Christmas ornament many years ago, and I’ve always wanted to make one myself. I decided to try this year, using some leftover oak I had in the shop. I had a very hard time finding good information on the about these, so I also decided to write up a bit of a tutorial.

Here’s the final result:

To make the snowflakes, we’ll use 3/4 inch thick wood, because it’s easy to come by. You can use any thickness you want, you’ll just have to scale your work up or down to match.

Start by setting your table saw blade to 30 degrees and making some diamond shaped rods. It’s important that the face of the diamond is side-grain, NOT end-grain. For example, cut the rods across the grain of a 1×4 rather than ripping long strips off the edges. The diamond face should have grain lines going across it (shown below). If the length of the rods have grain going down them, the face is end-grain and it tears and splinters when you do any of the next steps. Even on a very hard wood like maple I couldn’t get end-grain to work.

If you use 3/4 inch thick material, then each faces of the rod is roughly 7/8 of an inch. Mine were very slightly smaller than that because my stock was slightly thinner. The critical part here is that all four faces are exactly the same length.

The 30 degree setting is touchy. Try cutting 6 sample rods from some cheap wood like a pine 1×4. Assemble them in a snowflake shape (look at pictures further on in the instructions) and see if they fit with no gaps. If there’s a gap, increase or decrease the angle of the saw a tiny bit and try again. I usually had to adjust and re-try this step three or four times to get the angle exactly right. Once you get the angle correct, tighten the blade in place and make lots of rods, because the blade setup is the most time consuming finicky part of the whole operation.

Once you have your rods, it’s time to make them interesting. This plan is for a simple-looking snowflake using only the table saw. If you use a router you could use different bits and make many more interesting shapes.

I created a jig to help this process by cutting the edge off a 1×4 using the 30 degree angle blade, and then attaching a scrap piece of hardboard to one side. Lower the saw blade below the table, clamp the jig to the fence, and raise the blade up through the hardboard about 1/8 of an inch. This makes a nice custom zero-clearance table surface. For the first cut, the distance from the blade to the jig should be about half the width of the rod.

Slide the rods along the jig to cut a notch along each side.

Then move the jig so the same cut is made, quite close to the edge of the rod. Turn the rod over and do this last cut again, so the two cuts end up taking the point off the one edge of the rod.

Then start gluing and clamping pairs of rods together, with the missing corners together. These missing corners will make the hole in the center of the snowflake.

When the pairs are dry, unclamp and then test fit the pairs in groups of three.

Gluing and clamping is difficult, so we’ll do it in two more steps. First glue and clamp two pairs together. I needed two clamps to do this properly.

When they are dry, add the third pair. If there are gaps when they go together, you can adjust the fit by lightly sanding the loose piece. If the gaps are too large, you need to toss these out, adjust the 30 degree saw blade and try again. There’s no good way to repair a bad fit at this stage. Clamping was difficult so I used “plastic twine”, which is like stretchy plastic wrap.

Once they are all dry, I added some more decoration by putting a hole down through the center of each rod. It’s far easier to do this now than when the rods were not glued together.

The next step involves slicing snowflakes off of this bundle of rods, like cutting cookies off a roll of dough. I made a sliding jig for my bandsaw, if you have a nice bandsaw square that would do fine. I don’t.

Cut the slices to whatever thickness you like, mine are about 1/4 inch thick. Expect to lose the first slice, because the ends of the rods won’t be perfectly even, and expect to lose a few slices worth of wood at the end because it’s quite difficult to slice 1/4 inch slices off of a tiny piece of wood. I usually toss out the first 1/4 inch and the last inch of any bundle of rods I make.

Sand the faces of the snowflakes on a disk sander, or lay them on a table and use a palm sander.

And voila, ready for finish and string! (Yeah, this one has a tiny gap.. sigh)

I finished my oak snowflakes in a nice stain to emphasize the grain. You can clearcoat them with varathane, or finish them however else you want.

Here’s a prototype for my next design. I used a router to make the notches along the rods rather than the table saw. It makes aligning the rods a bit more difficult (this one is a bit sloppy) but I like the overall effect. It looks more like a snowflake and less like a star.

Have questions or suggestions? Let me know.

Make some? Post pictures!

My 13 year old wanted a Facebook account late last year, and Jenn and I decided that we should have accounts first, just to have a look around and see what this Facebook thing was all about.

I liked facebook. I liked seeing updates from people I hadn’t seen in 20 years. I liked the feeling of having a little community to look at and make jokes with during my work day. Facebook gives me pleasure.

The main question is: Facebook is pleasurable, but does it make me happy? That’s an important distinction.

Does the short term pleasure of the little manufactured intimacies translate into long-term life happiness? For me, the answer is turning out to be “no”. Facebook is yet another site to check and to maintain, and, I’m sorry folks, I’m really not a better person for it. It’s turning out to be one more thing to read and fill my head with that just doesn’t improve my life. I can’t imagine that keeping people who haven’t even said “Hello” to me in 20 years updated on the hourly status of my childrens’ head colds is giving anyone any real benefit, nor the other way around. Facebook doesn’t make me happy.

So, other than family and some close friends that I have relationship with in person, I’m going to be unfriending just about everyone. If you want to stay in touch, please do. I’ll still be writing here (more often now that I’m closing down Facebook). You have my email address, or you can contact us via the contact form here.

Please don’t take offense. It’s nothing personal. It was an experiment to see what Facebook was all about. Experiment complete. Facebook isn’t something I need to make me happy, therefore it’s being trimmed from my daily routine. I’m not saying Facebook isn’t a great tool for a lot of people, and for a lot of things, but the way I was using it wasn’t for me. Don’t be hurt. It’s not you, it’s me.

I’d love to quit Facebook entirely, especially considering their brutal new lack-of-Privacy Policy, in which your “Name, Profile Picture, Current City, Gender, Networks, Friend List and Pages” are public and searchable by anyone “which helps your friends find and connect with you” (bleah). But I don’t have to guts to take that stand right now, because my family is on facebook, as are some close friends who like to use it a lot. Someday soon, perhaps, but not quite yet.

I hope those of you who who are affected by this understand. If you want to keep in touch, you know where to reach me.

Just not on Facebook.